Electronic systems and circuits have made a significant contribution towards the advancement of modern society and are utilized in a number of applications to achieve advantageous results. Numerous electronic technologies such as digital computers, calculators, audio devices, video equipment, and telephone systems facilitate increased productivity and cost reduction in analyzing and communicating data, ideas and trends in most areas of business, science, education and entertainment. A number of different types of electronic systems often utilize textual information in the realization of these results. However, the generation, manipulation, retention and conveyance of textual information can be complicated and resource intensive.
Conventional textual information generation operations usually involve considerable manual input intervention. For example, traditional systems often require a user to manually type the information on a keyboard. Conventional attempts at automating textual information input usually involve proximity and object limitations. For example, traditional scanning attempts usually require the object to be a document that is flatly pressed directly against a transparent surface such as a piece of glass and closed in a dark environment under a cover with no ambient light. However, textual information can be originally printed or transcribed on a variety of mediums (such as whiteboards, advertisement bill boards, three dimension objects such as a box, block, ball, cylinder, etc.) that cannot be conveniently placed within the requisite direct contact with a scanner and in closed ambient lighting conditions. Establishing contrast boundaries can also be difficult for three dimensional text such as text on a curved surface, as the boundaries of text lines tend to bend and distort with the curved surface.
Traditional attempts at automating textual information input are also typically resource intensive. For example, a number of traditional attempts involving scanners require dedicated capture hardware and complex dedicated character recognition software. Some formats of storing information are resource intensive. For example, images in a bitmap format associated with picture elements (e.g., pixels) utilized in digital photography typically include a significant number bits to represent the pixels. Some digital cameras are able to save the image data straight from a CCD in an uncompressed file format (e.g., CCD RAW). Other conventional storage formats include tagged image file format (TIFF), graphic interchange format (GIF), or joint photographic experts group (JPEG) format. These formats typically save a significant amount of extraneous information that is minimally useful for text processing purposes, such as background image information not directly associated with the text, the color of the text, etc. These conventional storage formats also typically consume significant communication resources since the number of bits associated with the extraneous image information can be relatively large.
A number of different types of electronic systems are utilized in the generation, manipulation, retention and conveyance of textual information. A number of new categories of devices (e.g., such as portable game consoles, portable wireless communication devices, portable computer systems, etc.) are small enough to be held in the hands of a user making them very convenient. Handheld devices are becoming increasingly important as the underlying fundamental potential of various activities (e.g., communications, game applications, internet applications, etc.) are increasing. However, the resources (e.g., processing capability, storage resources, etc.) of handheld devices and systems are usually relatively limited. For example, the convenient portable nature of handheld devices often limits onboard processing and storage resources as well as communication abilities.
Limitations of hand held devices can make capturing, coordinating and manipulating information associated with a text very difficult or even impossible in a handheld device. Traditional interfacing with a system involving manual entry of textual information by a user can be difficult in situations where a user is supporting the device in one hand and can detract from the convenience. Even though handheld devices are portable, placing an object (e.g., a whiteboard, chalkboard, billboard, overhead projection, etc.) in close enough proximity to a handheld device for conventional scanning type devices can be difficult. Conventional scanning techniques also typically require special dedicate scanning hardware that often detracts from the portability and/or convenience of a handheld device. Storing and communicating textual information in a number of conventional image storage formats that involve a significant number of bits (e.g., bitmap, TIFF, etc.) can be particularly taxing on the relatively limited storage and communication resources of a handheld device.